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News About Tech, Money and InnovationTue, 31 Mar 2015 22:38:55 +0000en-UShourly1http://wordpress.org/?v=4.1.1Copyright 2015, VentureBeatFlickr’s new Chrome extension serves up a fresh photo with each new tab you openhttp://venturebeat.com/2015/03/18/flickrs-new-chrome-extension-serves-up-a-new-photo-with-each-new-tab-you-open/
http://venturebeat.com/2015/03/18/flickrs-new-chrome-extension-serves-up-a-new-photo-with-each-new-tab-you-open/#commentsWed, 18 Mar 2015 22:10:26 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=1681986Photo-hosting platform Flickr has launched a new extension for Chrome that serves up a fresh photo each time you open a new tab in Google's browser.
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Photo-hosting platform Flickr has launched a new extension for Chrome that presents a fresh photo each time you open a new tab in Google’s browser.

Flickr Tab is simple but does bring a little extra pizzazz to new tabs, and you can also click on a photo to view it directly on Flickr and look at more images from that uploader. The Yahoo-owned company is emulating a recent launch from Google itself, when the Internet giant introduced the Google Art Project extension, which serves up a classic piece of art every time you open a new tab.

]]>0Flickr’s new Chrome extension serves up a fresh photo with each new tab you openYahoo releases new Retina-optimized Flickr 3.2 for iPad, iOS 8http://venturebeat.com/2014/10/18/yahoo-releases-new-retina-optimized-flickr-3-2-for-ipad-ios-8/
http://venturebeat.com/2014/10/18/yahoo-releases-new-retina-optimized-flickr-3-2-for-ipad-ios-8/#commentsSat, 18 Oct 2014 15:15:59 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=1581155Flickr's first official iPad app, called Flickr 3.2, supports the "Retina" display found on the old iPad Air and iPad mini, as well as the new iPad Air 2 and the new iPad mini.
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Yahoo-owned Flickr previously offered an iOS app, but only for iPhones. The new iPad app, called Flickr 3.2, supports the “Retina” display found on the old iPad Air and iPad mini, as well as the new iPad Air 2 and the new iPad mini.

While Retina iPads aren’t new, it might be the release of iOS 8 that finally prompted Flickr to get with the program: The new iPad app only works with iOS 8.

iPhone users also have an updated Flickr 3.2 app, provided they’ve got the new OS.

The Flickr app can display images on that high-resolution screen with “up to 3,000,000 pixels per photo,” the company’s official blog post says — that’s approximately equal to the 2,048 by 1,056 pixels on the devices’ screens.

The app lets you browse your Flickr feed in both landscape and portrait mode, includes plenty of room for photo descriptions and metadata (one of Flickr’s strengths), and supports Flickr’s usual search and commenting features.

It also lets you take pictures with your iPad, and even offers a live filters and a live histogram (a photo exposure graph often found on digital SLRs) so you can see how your photo will turn out before you press the virtual shutter button.

While taking photos with tablets is really annoying to some people, Flickr is taking full advantage of the new iPads’ high-resolution screen and excellent camera, which maybe — just maybe — will lead to better photos.

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]]>0Yahoo releases new Retina-optimized Flickr 3.2 for iPad, iOS 8Google+ may spin out a standalone photo servicehttp://venturebeat.com/2014/08/01/google-may-spin-out-a-standalone-photo-service/
http://venturebeat.com/2014/08/01/google-may-spin-out-a-standalone-photo-service/#commentsFri, 01 Aug 2014 22:42:43 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=1518619Maybe Google+ is not the Facebook-like, all-encompassing social product Google needed, and maybe a separate Flickr-like photo-storage service is what it could be.
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Maybe Google+ is not the Facebook-like, all-encompassing social product Google needed, and maybe a separate Flickr-like photo-storage service is what it could be.

The Internet giant could spin out Google+’s photo service as an independent part from the social network, according to Bloomberg’s sources. The service would allegedly be called Google+ Photos and would still work with the social network despite also being available on its own.

This would be Google+’s latest attempt in finding its way a forming a new user base. Google acquired photo-editor Picnik in 2010, and integrated it into Google+ in 2012, which would likely power Google+ Photo’s editing features.

Just like Facebook, Google+ users can store photos and videos on their accounts and use Google+ to share those with friends, family, and their networks. Google+ Photos would be more akin to Flickr, the Yahoo-owned photo-storage network that also sports social sharing capabilities.

Google+ Photos could also be an attempt to keep up with Facebook-owned Instagram, a photo-focused social network the company acquired in 2012.

“Over here in our darkroom, we’re always developing new ways for people to snap, share and say cheese,” Google said in an e-mailed statement to Bloomberg, vaguely alluding to this rumor.

Google+, originally launched in the summer of 2011 as Google’s effort to battle social network Facebook, has had a tumultuous ride, experimenting with features, various degrees of integration with other Google products, user engagement challenges, and ultimately losing Vic Gundotra, who was heading the project back in April.

In October, the Google+ team made a huge push in enhancing photo-related features, unveiling 18 new things for its photo-loving users. At the time, Gundotra also said that Google+ had more than 500 million users and that more than 1.5 billion photos were uploaded each week, a far cry from Facebook’s 1 billion users.

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]]>0Google+ may spin out a standalone photo serviceFlickr will pay photographers — but how much?http://venturebeat.com/2014/07/29/flickr-will-pay-photographers-but-how-much/
http://venturebeat.com/2014/07/29/flickr-will-pay-photographers-but-how-much/#commentsTue, 29 Jul 2014 19:36:23 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=1515978Flickr's system may well guarantee participants a fair rate of pay, but if so, details are hazy.
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Flickr today announced a program for users to license their original photography to photo agencies and editors, but Yahoo has remained tight-lipped about how the system will work. Though it wasn’t entirely clear from the initial announcement, the company says photographers will be paid—though it’s not clear how much.

“Photographers will of course be paid when their content is licensed,” Flickr spokesperson Ana Braskamp told VentureBeat. “The rights to photos licensed will depend on the type of license, and that will clearly be communicated to our photographers.”

The program, called Curated Connections, was announced this morning in a blog post by Flickr curator Liz Lapp. It seems designed to compete with 500px, a site that passes on 70 percent of the proceeds from licensed images to member photographers.

“Flickr’s curators are searching for exciting and credible opportunities for you to share your exceptional photography,” Lapp wrote. “They will reach out to you via Flickr Mail and provide details on Flickr’s licensing program.”

The rise of the euphemistically termed “gig economy,” which has reduced many freelancers to working for less than minimum wage with no benefits, casts a shadow over services that promise to provide income for the self-employed. Journalists and photographers have been squeezed by the phenomenon as well, with prominent publications including The Atlanticopting to pay reporters in “exposure” rather than a check.

Consciously or not, the announcement evokes that mentality, promising nebulously to “try to connect you with original photo assignments.”

Reached by phone, Lapp was not able to provide details about the program.

TechCrunch reports that the program has frayed relations between Yahoo and partner Getty images, where there is concern that Curated Connections is insourcing the service they provide to Yahoo. And in April, Flickr lost head of product Markus Spiering to EyeEm, another photographer marketplace similar to 500px.

Flickr, owned by struggling early web giant Yahoo, has worked in recent years to compete with slick photo sharing tools on Facebook, Google+ (where Google has courted professional photographers with some success) and by upstart competitors like 500px and EyeEm. Last year, the photo sharing service redesigned its web interface around a wide, high-detail display, and it has recently updated the search, editing and upload features of its iOS and Android app.

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]]>0Flickr will pay photographers — but how much?Flickr becomes a free use haven (again) with Creative Commons search filtershttp://venturebeat.com/2014/05/16/flickr-becomes-a-free-use-haven-again-with-creative-commons-search-filters/
http://venturebeat.com/2014/05/16/flickr-becomes-a-free-use-haven-again-with-creative-commons-search-filters/#commentsFri, 16 May 2014 13:54:35 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=1474769Flickr is quietly rolling out new image license filters in search — returning the capability to easily search for photographs which are labeled for free use under Creative Commons licenses. The change, spotted by Search Engine Land, is reportedly rolling out to users now — although the feature is already live on our end. Flickr’s most […]
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Flickr is quietly rolling out new image license filters in search — returning the capability to easily search for photographs which are labeled for free use under Creative Commons licenses.

Flickr’s most recent redesign relegated license searching to the clunky advanced search and creative commons pages. While the functionality was there, it was remarkably easy to navigate away from different license searches, creating a cumbersome experience for users.

The new filters [below] enable a standard Creative Commons license filter, a filter for commercial use, and another for “modifications allowed.”

This isn’t the first time Flickr has buried, and then unburied license filters. A similar incident occurred last year prior to the most recent redesign.

Slack founder and chief executive Stewart Butterfield is hell-bent on a mission to make email obsolete and businesses more productive.

With his new SaaS-based messaging and search platform Slack, which just raised $42 million in venture funding from some of the Valley’s biggest names Friday, Stewart and his 23 person staff may well be on their way.

“Fifteen years ago, everything was Microsoft and it wanted control. (With Slack), everything flows into one central channel,” he said.

“Slack is making information more accessible and making it easier to take action on.”

The fast-talking Butterfield’s beef is with the way companies currently communicate — that is, through multiple channels like email, document-sharing, and instant messaging. Its a mess. It means you’re less productive.

Slack is ultimately a multi-tasking, searchable platform where employees find themselves centralized and on the same page.

Butterfield has been around the Valley’s block in every sense of the word. He co-founded Flickr with Caterina Fake, who later became his wife. They have since divorced. Flickr launched in 2004 and the following year was sold to Yahoo for around $35 million. Some say Yahoo got a bargain.

Slack is truly cross platform and runs on Android, iOS, and yes, even desktop.

It officially launched in February and within a few weeks had more than 10,000 daily users and was processing more than two million messages a week. Those stats have grown quickly to 60,000 daily users and ten million messages coming and going. Slack’s customer base is scaling rapidly. AOL. PayPal. Quora. Adobe. And dozens of others.

Butterfield said its explosive growth is due to word of mouth. No marketing. No gimmicks. Call it viral socializing.

Incredibly, Slack started as a massive virtual Web-based game called TinySpeck, but the development team switched gears when they realized the software had potentially bigger uses. Initially, Butterfield said, there were plenty of skeptics. Now, he said, many of those have now become fans.

In it’s short life, Slack is already cash-flow positive. And it’s ramping up quickly. (Read: hiring.)

For the latest fundraising, Linkedin chief Jeff Weiner, Bradley Horowitz of Google, former Groupon operating officer Rob Solomon, and Twitter co-founder Biz Stone pitched in. The Social + Capital Partnership led this recent round, with existing investors Accel Partners and Andreessen Horowitz also in the mix.

“We actually didn’t even need the money,” Butterfield said.

“People said we were out to kill email completely. That’s not entirely true. Any bit of information that stops on the site is absorbed into the platform and becomes accessible to anybody.”

]]>0Flickr cofounder’s new startup is called Slack, and it just raised $42MYahoo’s new Flickr app adds creepily accurate search toolhttp://venturebeat.com/2014/04/17/yahoos-new-flickr-app-adds-creepily-accurate-search-tool/
http://venturebeat.com/2014/04/17/yahoos-new-flickr-app-adds-creepily-accurate-search-tool/#commentsFri, 18 Apr 2014 04:00:07 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=1452008Continuing its efforts to remain relevant in the post-Instagram world, Yahoo has unveiled updates to its Flickr app for iOS and Android. “At the heart of our Flickr apps is a powerful mobile camera that makes it easy to take and share amazing photos in high resolution,” Yahoo vice president Bernardo Hernandez wrote, with amazing […]
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Continuing its efforts to remain relevant in the post-Instagram world, Yahoo has unveiled updates to its Flickr app for iOS and Android.

“At the heart of our Flickr apps is a powerful mobile camera that makes it easy to take and share amazing photos in high resolution,” Yahoo vice president Bernardo Hernandez wrote, with amazing redundancy, since the same could be said of any smartphone app that uses your phone’s powerful mobile camera.

Some of the new features are quite amazing, notably the cool new open-ended search tool. You can search for “January 2013″ to find photos from that date or search for “San Francisco” to find amazing photos geotagged with that location by your (or others’) powerful mobile cameras. You can even specify objects like “car” or “tree” or “portrait.”

The search algorithm is powerful enough that it even recognized trees in drawings I had made and uploaded to Flickr. It showed me photos of my wife when I typed her name into the search box on my profile in the app — probably picking up on tags or photo titles that I had added after taking those photos with my powerful mobile camera. Still, the effect was powerful, cool, and a little creepy.

Strangely, when I tried the same name search on the Flickr web site, it showed me a bunch of nude photos, which was a little awkward. They were, however, all amazing photos in high resolution.

In other ways, the new Flickr app has received an extensive but largely cosmetic overhaul. It’s got a more dramatic layout for photos that makes your amazing photos in high resolution appear larger. The app also has a black background throughout, instead of a white background, because everyone knows that black backgrounds are more sophisticated.

The new apps include the same “live” filter option found in the previous versions: Instead of first taking a photo and then applying a filter, as with other photo apps, you can apply filters while you’re still framing your shot, so you can see what it might look like before you press the virtual shutter button in order to engage your powerful mobile camera’s sensor.

The powerful mobile camera at the heart of the Flickr app is also capable of recording HD video clips up to 30 seconds long.

Flickr has offered a terabyte of storage — for free — since May, 2013, which is enough space for more than 500,000 amazing photos taken by your powerful mobile camera, Flickr says.

As a longtime Flickr user, I’m looking forward to testing this app more extensively. Because the powerful mobile camera in previous versions of the Flickr app were rather sluggish, Instagram has become my default tool for taking amazing photos, messing them up with filters, and then uploading them to Flickr. With the new iOS app, it seems faster — at least in my limited tests — although the camera did crash the app once. To be fair, many apps on my aging iPhone 4S crash when I try to use the camera.

If Flickr’s new powerful mobile camera is all it’s cracked up to be, it might just be enough to bring me back to the app full-time.

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]]>0Yahoo’s new Flickr app adds creepily accurate search toolFlickr's product chief defects to EyeEm, another photography communityhttp://venturebeat.com/2014/04/05/flickrs-product-chief-defects-to-eyeem-another-photography-community/
http://venturebeat.com/2014/04/05/flickrs-product-chief-defects-to-eyeem-another-photography-community/#commentsSat, 05 Apr 2014 17:08:53 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?post_type=vb_syndicated&p=1330951“Personally, I see that EyeEm has the potential to be one of the global players. And what is more exciting than being part of building a world-class product?”
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EyeEm, the photography community and marketplace, keeps growing and announced this week they got Flickr’s head of product, Markus Spiering, on board.

Markus Spiering, who was named one of Silicon Valley’s top 40 under 40 by the Silicon Valley Business Journal in late 2013, was available for a short talk with VentureVillage and shared some personal views about his new position.

Originally from Berlin, he said he was excited to return to his hometown to work with EyeEm and to get involved in the startup environment again. Having been in touch with EyeEm co-founder and CEO Flo Meissner for over two years, he has always been interested in the product.

“We had inspiring talks about the market and growth. The best was to discuss ideas, innovations, and product development, though”, he states.

Finally, the decision to join the EyeEm team was influenced by three key factors:

“EyeEm’s vision, truly impressive technology, and the quality of people are the reasons that convinced me that this would be the right next step for me.”

He continued, “Personally, I see that EyeEm has the potential to be one of the global players. And what is more exciting than being part of building a world-class product?”

The knowledge and learnings he already gained in his past and in this market are definitely a plus he can use in EyeEm’s continuing expansion into the U.S. market.

“We feel honored and are understandably excited to have Markus on our team“, says Florian Meissner, co-founder and CEO of EyeEm.

EyeEm is on a pretty fast track right now: Later this year, the company will launch EyeEm Market, a portal where clients can purchase images taken by EyeEm’s worldwide community of over 10 million photographers.

Slack emerged out of beta today and introduced a tiered pricing model. Slack is an internal communication tool for distributed teams. It aims to make people “less busy” by bringing all of their communications together in one place.

It was founded by Stuart Butterfield, a cofounder of Flickr, which Yahoo bought for a reported $35 million in 2005.

Slack collects messages and files from Twitter, DropBox, Google Drive, Asana, GitHub, ZenDesk, Mail Chimp as well as instant messages. It integrates their announcements, alerts, bug tracking, and data into the communications stream when and where appropriate.

Teams can then create open channels for projects, groups, and topics and set up custom notifications. Slack also has a search function, tools for uploading documents, and “ambient awareness” of what your coworkers are doing. The system analyzes all of this activity and provides reports on usage statistics.

“We have a real challenge getting organizations to switch, because if it’s consumer software, it’s just one person who needs to put it on your phone, and you use it,” Butterfield told VentureBeat last year. “But when you have to convince 17 people at once, or 35 people, 58 people, and some people come to office pissed off about something that happened … and then their boss comes in and tells them they need to use the new notifications system, sometimes they say, ‘Fuck you!’”

Collaboration remains a significant challenge for companies of all sizes despite the number of startups working on the problem, such as Yammer, Hipchat, Asana, or Basecamp. The trouble is that all of these different tools distribute information across multiple locations, and keeping up with all that activity is just as time-consuming as staying on top of email.

After launching in private beta in August, Slack signed up 8,000 customers in 24 hours. Butterfield told VentureBeat that organizations using Slack during the test period dramatically reduced their dependence on email. Fortune reported that Slack now has 16,000 daily active users across over 1,500 teams. These employees send a collective 2.5 million messages last week, and early customers include Square, Urban Outfitters, and Harvard Law School.

Slack has a free option for “lite users.” From there, it costs $8 per month per user or $15 per month per user depending on your storage needs. It has an enterprise tier planned for next year as well as features for guest access, additional administrative controls, and a “configurable email ingestion service.”

Slack is the first product from Tiny Speck, which has backing from Andreessen Horowitz and Accel Partners.

It would be difficult to miss the skyward drift of storage and software over the last few years. “The cloud” is where you store your music and other files, and back up your computer.

But a wide range of web-based applications — from Salesforce to Google Docs — are taking advantage of widespread broadband and increasingly cheaper storage to put desktop clients on notice. Users like the flexibility of accessing their apps and data anywhere, and collaborating without having to send file versions back and forth.

Not every class of software has kept pace.

Creative tools have traditionally been laggards, only offering desktop client solutions while word processors, spreadsheets, marketing automation, and more have made successful leaps to the browser. But that’s changing. The likes of Aviary (with 50 million active users, and the official picture editor for Flickr), Pixlr (acquired by Autodesk in 2011) and Picnik (acquired by Google and integrated into Google+) have paved inroads into the amateur photo editing space, opening up the way for professional design and prototyping toolsets like Flite Design Studio, Flinto and Macaw.

The consumer photo editing products make sense. Consumers looking to fix white balance issues or remove red eye aren’t interested in spending hundreds of dollars for full-featured professional photo software, and if the end product will be shared digitally—via email, or shared on Facebook or Twitter—using an app that’s on the phone or in the browser makes the path to sharing that much shorter.

But for professional design tools, the reasons are even more compelling:

Review and collaboration are easier when teams are all accessing the same creative through the same browser gateway

File sharing and version collision issues become moot

Web-based software never needs updating

Browser rendering becomes an intrinsic part of the creative development process, instead of an additional iterative process tacked on to the end

An important component to this move has been a standardization of the technology behind web-based multimedia under HTML5. Flash is notorious not only for the frequent software updates needed to avoid crashes, but also for not playing nice with iOS, leaving out a significant segment of the burgeoning mobile market. Its incompatibility with half of the rapidly-growing global market of phones and tablets signals its death knell.

In fact, we’re well past an inflection point.

HTML5 is supported in far more browsers in use today than Flash is. Netflix is switching from Silverlight, Microsoft’s Flash analogue, to HTML5, and YouTube and Vimeo also enable HTML5 players (the default on the former). Consumers will begin to lapse with their Flash updates since most of the media they want to consume won’t need it, and Flash content will simply not render. Developing interactive content in Flash is a dying proposition in an HTML5-ascendant world.

HTML5’s growing support across the full range of modern devices dovetails nicely with the meteoric rise of mobile as consumers’ primary screen. Time’s Mobility Poll last year found that half of Americans sleep next to their phone, and 29% say their phone is the first thing they touch in the morning, and the last thing they touch at night.

But what’s also interesting to note is that PCs and televisions haven’t been done away with. They are simply screens that consumers access in addition to their mobile devices, often at the same time. Consumers hop from device to device as their contexts change; they might use their tablet at home, their phone while on the move, and their PC at the office.

Reducing the complexity of multi-screen media is the move to responsive design and streamlined creative development workflows. Responsive design imagines a single creative that can display well within an almost infinite number of dimensional permutations, by expanding and contracting given size constraints. And even when that’s not possible, creative platforms are increasingly moving to HTML5-based creative development platforms that permit the creation of a range of creatives through an identical process, leveraging the reuse of visual assets, functionality and action sequencing.

Although all of this is abundantly clear to those of us in the digital advertising space, the multi-screen revolution, powered by HTML5, is a boon to app developers, web content creators and publishers, as well. Anyone with a stake in delivering experiences to users instead of the devices they use will march forward, and upward into the cloud.

Will Price is CEO of SaaS ad platform company Flite. Prior to joining Flite, he was managing director at Hummer Winblad Venture Partners.

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]]>0Design in the cloud: Creative tools start embracing the HTML5 revolutionYahoo buys image-recognition startup LookFlowhttp://venturebeat.com/2013/10/23/yahoo-buys-image-recognition-startup-lookflow/
http://venturebeat.com/2013/10/23/yahoo-buys-image-recognition-startup-lookflow/#commentsWed, 23 Oct 2013 18:39:57 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=845065Image recognition is a problem the Flickr team has been working on for a while, so it'll be interesting to find out whether all this intellectual capital leads to a true industry breakthrough.
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Yahoo has just acquired LookFlow, an image recognition/machine learning startup, for an undisclosed sum. The five-engineer team will be joining the Flickr group at Yahoo, and its technology will be integrated in future versions of Flickr.

The technology is, according to the company’s LinkedIn profile, “a powerful new way for people to find, explore, collect, and share all kinds of things they’re interested in.

Reps for the deal also said the startup would be working with Flickr on deep learning projects. What is deep learning? you might ask.

Deep learning is a really fascinating discipline, a sub-niche of machine learning that tries to learn complicated systems like neural networks using equally complicated algorithm sets. Nerd party over at Flickr, y’all!

Yahoo/Flickr also recently acquired another image recognition startup, IQ Engines. That service focused on finding text, objects, and people within photos.

We’ll see what Flickr ends up doing with the tech. Image recognition is a problem the team has been working on for a while, so it’ll be interesting to find out whether all this intellectual capital leads to a true industry breakthrough — and a marked competitive advantage in the increasingly competitive market of photo-storage and photo-sharing apps.

LookFlow was founded in 2009 and is based conveniently in Mountain View, Calif.

Venerable photo-sharing site Flickr, which massively revamped its interface earlier this year, has gone one step further. Now, the pictures are even bigger, and the details are off to the side.

As, arguably, they should be.

Flickr’s redesign in May made the photo site much more visual, with a massive focus on making pictures in your photostream as large and impressive as possible, while stripping the rest of the interface down. That is pretty much exactly what Flickr is now doing with individual photo pages.

Essentially, what Flick is doing is making the photo as large as possible, while pushing the interface detail — whose photo, how many views, photo description, comments, sharing options, and so on — off to the side. The result is a much cleaner, more arresting portrayal of your images.

“With the new photo experience the image is about 25% bigger than on the previous photo page,” Flickr said in a blog post. “You’ll see more pixels, get a cleaner view without any elements on the top or the bottom of the screen, so that photos can really be the center point.”

Interestingly, by making the picture bigger, Flickr says it’s also making the information about the picture better.

Above: New Flickr interface

Image Credit: John Koetsier

Previously, if you wanted information about the photos you were viewing on Flickr, you likely needed to scroll the page down to find the title and description, as well as any comments. With the new full-screen version, that information is visible without scrolling, even though the photo itself is bigger.

Even though the photos are bigger, however, Flickr says it’s using “new technology” to make the photo viewing and navigating process faster. That’s an important point, because one of the critiques of the new Flickr from the site’s long-time loyalists was that the site took too long to load.

It will be interesting to see how Flickr’s users respond to this new change.

Even though the spring update increased site traffic and uploads, according to a company representative I talked to, many of the site’s long-time users rebelled viciously against the change, preferring the old, familiar site.

This new update is more of an evolutionary step than a major overhaul, however, so it may meet with less resistance.

Flickr’s iOS app can finally auto-upload your photos directly to the photo-sharing service, Yahoo announced in a Tumblr post Wednesday.

With today’s update installed, you can go ahead and turn on the auto-upload feature (iOS 7 required). This sends your entire camera roll to Flickr’s handy cloud storage locker, where the photos are marked private until you’re ready to edit and share.

Even though the photos upload in full resolution, it’ll take a seriously long time to fill that sucker up: Flickr offers 1TB of free storage per account.

Previously, you had to upload photos from your iPhone or iPod Touch devices manually, which even Yahoo admits could be pretty irritating. This new update brings the Flickr app in line with offerings from Facebook, Dropbox, and Google+ Photos, all of which offer auto-upload functionality on iOS.

The updated Flickr app also features an auto-straightening tool, which will tilt and crop askew photos with a single button press. Auto-straightening “works like magic when your photo is just a little bit off,” said Markus Spiering, head of product at Flickr.

Flickr’s iOS app isn’t perfect — it still lacks native iPad support — but it’s come a long way in the last year. Between the new filters and editing tools this August and today’s additions, Flickr for iOS is an increasingly attractive option for mobile photographers.

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]]>1Flickr's iOS app finally does the uploading for youNew Flickr for iPhone has more filters and some awesome new trickshttp://venturebeat.com/2013/08/29/new-flickr-for-iphone-has-more-filters-and-some-awesome-new-tricks/
http://venturebeat.com/2013/08/29/new-flickr-for-iphone-has-more-filters-and-some-awesome-new-tricks/#commentsFri, 30 Aug 2013 02:00:29 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=804954The new Flickr app for iOS not only gives you a handful of sweet new filters, it also lets you customize the filters and make them all your own. And it features something the Flickr team calls a "Live Preview."
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For the smartphone shutterbugs out there, Yahoo is rolling out some fresh hotness. The new Flickr app for iOS not only gives you a handful of sweet new filters, it also lets you customize the filters and make them all your own. And it features something the Flickr team calls a “Live Preview.”

In Live Preview mode, you can see the filter applied to whatever your camera’s pointed at before you press the shutter button. This way, you can decide which filter looks best before taking the photo.

Also in today’s launch, you’ll find new camera features such as a handy grid, focus and exposure locks, and pinch-to-zoom. Editing features now include tools like sharpening, color balancing, and levels.

You also might notice some elegant new animations and transitions within the app.

]]>1New Flickr for iPhone has more filters and some awesome new tricksFlickr founder Stewart Butterfield's new Slack signed up 8,000 companies in 24 hourshttp://venturebeat.com/2013/08/15/flickr-founder-stewart-butterfields-new-slack-signed-up-8000-companies-in-24-hours/
http://venturebeat.com/2013/08/15/flickr-founder-stewart-butterfields-new-slack-signed-up-8000-companies-in-24-hours/#commentsFri, 16 Aug 2013 00:27:37 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=798980VANCOUVER -- Not every tech founder can follow up a massive success with another massive success. But a couple years after a failed gaming endeavor, Glitch, it looks like Flickr cofounder Stewart Butterfield may have another big winner on his hands.
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VANCOUVER — Not every tech founder can follow up a massive success with another massive success. But a couple years after a failed gaming endeavor, Glitch, it looks like Flickr cofounder Stewart Butterfield may have another big winner on his hands.

That’s many more companies than Butterfield expected — so much so that he joked that the wait list to get into the limited preview release would take approximately four years.

“That’s way more than we can handle,” he said. “Technologically, no problem, we can handle it.” But onboarding each company is a process, as expected.

Slack is an internal communications tool for distributed teams — a Yammer, in a sense. The goal is to bring all your company’s communication together in one place, from e-mail, instant messaging, text messages, Yammer-like tools, corporate intranets, wikis, and more. And after seeing it, it’s just possible that Slack could massively reduce our crippling dependence on email.

The tool isn’t just a connector, communicator, and file-transfer utility. It also connects with external services such as DropBox, Twitter, Zendesk, Crashlytics, HelpScout, and Heroku and integrates their announcements, alerts, bug tracking, and data into the communications stream when and where appropriate. In addition, with distributed search built right into Slack as a core part of the product, full-text search for any documents uploaded to the system — and for any Google Documents shared on Slack — it’s a single place to manage just about everything.

Organizations that have been trying Slack in its private beta-test period have dramatically reduced their dependence on e-mail, Butterfield told me.

But he’s not letting 8,000 potential customers on the Slack waiting list get him too excited. Butterfield is realistic about the challenges of enterprise software adoption.

“We have a real challenge getting organizations to switch, because if it’s consumer software, it’s just one person who need to put it on your phone, and you use it,” he told me. “But when you have to convince 17 people at once, or 35 people, 58 people, and some people come to office pissed off about something that happened … and then their boss comes in and tells them they need to use the new notifications system, sometimes they say, ‘Fuck you!'”

]]>1Flickr founder Stewart Butterfield's new Slack signed up 8,000 companies in 24 hoursYahoo hires former Google exec to lead Flickrhttp://venturebeat.com/2013/08/06/yahoo-hires-new-flickr-head/
http://venturebeat.com/2013/08/06/yahoo-hires-new-flickr-head/#commentsWed, 07 Aug 2013 05:22:32 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=790417Yahoo has hired former Google exec Bernardo Hernández to head up the company's community photo sharing site Flickr today.
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Yahoo has hired former Google exec Bernardo Hernández today to head up Flickr, the company’s community photo sharing site.

Hernández, who announced the news via Twitter earlier today, previously ran Google-owned review/ratings service Zagat. He was also a favorite of Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer when she was still at Google, and may have been working at Yahoo for the last several weeks without an official role at the company, reports AllThingsD.

Yahoo rolled out a massive overhaul for Flickr earlier this year, drastically updating the user interface, improving performance, and giving all users up to 1TB of storage for free. Over the last week, Yahoo saw former Flickr head Brett Wayn depart. And that’s interesting, since Mayer has touted the Flickr redesign, led by Wayn, as part of the company’s long-term plan for success.

Hernández is one of several former Google execs to join Mayer’s team at Yahoo. Other former Googlers include Dylan Casey and current Yahoo COO Henrique de Castro.

I’m sick of photos. I have an excellent mirrorless camera, I take tons of photos with my smartphone, but for the most part the only time I really have to reflect on a photo is when it’s Instagram-worthy. The rest simply piles up on a memory card, or gets dumped into a folder on my desktop, destined to be forgotten.

San Francisco-based Everpix calls this problem the “photo mess,” and it’s something the startup has been laser-focused on solving for the past two years. After initially making headlines for its ability to store all of your photos in the cloud, Everpix’s true goal ended up being far more interesting: It wants you to love your photos again.

Today Everpix is launching the second version of its platform, along with new iPhone and iPad apps, all of which are focused on unearthing your best photos automatically. Judging from my time with the service, it’s well on its way to becoming the ideal headache-free photo management solution.

The company’s proposition is simple: Upload all of your photos to its servers (either through its Mac or Windows apps) and sit back as it instantly organizes them into a beautiful interface. Once all your photos are online, you’ll be able to access any of them instantly via the Everpix website or iOS apps. (Everpix has outsourced work on an Android app to another company.) You can also tie other services into Everpix, including Instagram, Flickr, and Twitter.

“Organizing photos shouldn’t be like putting them in a file cabinet,” said Pierre-Olivier Latour, Everpix’s CEO and co-founder, in an interview with VentureBeat. “Because we have all our users’ photos, we can build interesting ways for us to reengage.”

With Everpix 2.0, the company refined its iPhone and iPad interface to focus even more on your photos. Now there’s a non-stop stream of photos throughout the apps, and they also intelligently group together photos from a single event. Just tap on one of the event’s photos to expand the rest. Everpix has also improved its Highlights feature, which digs up the best shots from a particular event using the company’s patent-pending image analysis technology.

Flashback, another new feature, shows you interesting photos on today’s date for every year in your photo collection. It’s a fascinating way to reflect on just how much your life has changed in the past year.

Above: Highlights from an Everpix album.

Image Credit: Everpixe

In my brief testing of the new Everpix app, I found it to be even more enticing for exploring photos than its predecessor. It was better at highlighting interesting photos, and the ability to breeze through several months of photos at a time felt addictive. I’ve also been using the earlier service over the past few months, and I’ve grown used to having instant access to my entire photo library with me just about anywhere.

While the company isn’t revealing any user metrics yet, Latour tells me the subscription rate for people who upload at least 1,000 photos is above 20 percent. In March, Everpix also opened up a free version of its service, which lets you access photos for up to one-year. For unlimited access to your photos, you’ll have to pay $5 a month or $49 a year.

Everpix has raised around $2.3 million from Index Ventures, 500 Startups, Kii Capital, and 2020 Ventures. Shockingly, it still only has six employees.

Since the last time we covered Everpix in December 2012, both Flickr and Google+ have made major upgrades. Flickr now has a revamped interface and 1 terabyte of free storage for every user, while Google+ has added new features to highlight and enhance photos.

Latour tells me he isn’t too worried about the competition: “Big companies are slowly moving in this direction, but none of them are really as far as we are,” he said. “This is our DNA, we’ve been studying this problem for two years.”

]]>0Everpix 2.0: Infinite photo storage startup finds new ways to highlight your best shotsWhy the 'New Flickr' still falls shorthttp://venturebeat.com/2013/05/28/new-flickr-ux/
http://venturebeat.com/2013/05/28/new-flickr-ux/#commentsTue, 28 May 2013 15:46:50 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=745839Guest:Etsy's lead designer explains where the Flickr team went wrong.
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Over the past week or so, I’ve found myself revisiting the new Flickr and trying to figure out just why it feels like the product release falls short. A lot has changed, including what Flickr, at its core, is. A few particular pieces stand out, however, that should be discussed. Not so much as a critique of Flickr, but rather as lessons we can all benefit from as we think about our own products. In no particular order:

User experience is about the tech, too

While I don’t particularly love the new profile design (the list of photos lacks hierarchy, focus, and context), its biggest problem is a technical one: speed. It doesn’t matter if people enjoy the new layout if the photos don’t load smoothly and quickly. It appears the new design required more photos per page than before in order to feel rich and full. But that meant implementing some lazy-loading that really gets crushed as the user scrolls. Tons of blank spaces and many seconds before the photos pop in.

We’re all responsible for the user experience (not just designers). Does the page respond quickly? What happens when it doesn’t? At Etsy, we have a special admin toolbar that measures page load times and lets us know when a page is above the acceptable load time (and we’re constantly working to shave milliseconds off load times). The most beautiful design in the world doesn’t matter if the person exits/bounces before it shows up.

Focus on your customer

Until recently, Flickr was very much geared for pro users. With a limit of 200 photos before hitting a paywall, there wasn’t much reason for those of us who shoot exclusively with our mobile phones to leave the warm embrace of Facebook or Instagram. Sure, there were definitely casual photographers on Flickr, but the old single-photo view was packed with data (such as the EXIF info) that no one but seasoned photogs cared about or even understood. For that reason (along with the yearly subscription fee), most characterizations I’ve heard of Flickr in the past few years centered around pro usage and being popular amongst that demographic.

With this release, it’s as if Flickr couldn’t decide who their customer is. It’s totally within their rights to shift their strategy to go after the casual market (it may be the right move for them), but some of their design changes fight against each other:

Increasing the amount of storage, but calling it out as a terabyte (understood only by the tech savvy and pro photographers).

Promoting that free terabyte of storage, but removing the useful EXIF data from the single photo view.

A Pinterest-esque photo gallery design, but no sense of social activity on the page.

Who is the product for? Who is the customer? If you don’t know that, your design will similarly contradict itself, failing to feel like a cohesive experience.

If you’re doing an overhaul, do an overhaul

As I browse the site, I keep having this internal monologue:

“Oh, this view is lovely.”

[scroll]

“What the — old Flickr?”

It’s apparent from some of the Flickr designers’ tweets that the timeline for this project was pretty condensed. But man, what a bummer to halfway design a beautiful baseline for future iterations and have the other half of the page look and feel like you forgot to touch it up. I mean, yeah, that takes more time, but if you’re doing a design overhaul, do an overhaul. Or at least bring the rest of the content enough in line with the new parts that it doesn’t feel so disjointed. Personally, I wouldn’t advocate for total product revamps like this (too many variables make it hard to understand the results). But if you’re going to do one, go all the way.

As I said before, I don’t mean this so much as a critique of Flickr (I’m not a member). Who knows what the internal process looked like? Having worked at a similarly large company, I could venture a guess, but the fact remains that overhauling and changing the model for such an established and beloved brand is a herculean task no matter where you’re working.

While the changes may not mesh entirely with their past, it’s heartening that the Flickr folks are now empowered to develop and build their product again. And, regardless of where they end up, the journey promises to be an interesting one.

Cap Watkins is a New York City-dwelling interface designer, currently design lead at Etsy, formerly at Formspring, Amazon, and Zoosk. This post originally appeared on his personal blog. While he is not currently exploring other job opportunities, he’d love to talk about your next big idea at [cwatkins at gmail dot com].

This week I did something that I hadn’t done for five months and 12 days: I went to Flickr on my laptop, accessed some photos on my hard drive, uploaded them, named them, tagged them, and organized them in a set.

The magic of the Internet happened before my eyes, and they joined the other rectangular images on the venerable photo-sharing site. And finally, for the first time in almost half a year, I had something beside square pics on my Flickr photostream.

Yahoo announced its massive revamp of the Flickr service with three missing Es, calling the updated site Biggr, Spectaculr, and Wherevr. But really, the update boils down to two massive changes: Dropping freemium and making an old and tired user interface awesome.

Since I was just wondering about reupping my Pro account, the first is really significant.

Yahoo’s giving each Flickr user a full terabyte of space for images for free, which essentially means you don’t need to be a Pro user anymore. You still can, for an ad-free account, or to add even more space … but I don’t mind a few ads, and I’m only using 0.8 percent of my freely available terabyte anyways.

But the best and most important is the incredible new look.

There’s varied response to the new look, to say the least, and the official forum thread on the new layout has a staggering 241 pages of user comments: 24,102 in total so far. The vast majority of them are negative, and most of those appear to be from long-time users who liked the site the way it was and are asking Flickr to change it back.

Good luck.

Flickr as it was was turning into a byway, a leftover, and an also-ran. Which is why most of the pics on my photostream and home page were square: They were exports, shares from Instagram photos. In other words, Flickr was changing from the place where you went to share photos from, to the place where you shared photos to. That may be a small change in the English language, but it’s a massive change in user engagement.

And it had huge effects on Flickr’s traffic, which dropped about 40 percent in the last year alone:

The new look is gorgeous and photo-centric, giving photos — the raison d’etre of Flickr — center stage.

Sure, it’s Pinterest-ic and Tumblr-y. But if you love images and imagery, the new Flickr displays photos immeasurably better that the previous iteration. In a funny modern way, your digital photostream now resembles an old-fashioned photography album, without any cheesy in-your-face design elements attempting to highlight the fact.

In addition, the new layout options gave Yahoo the option of displaying images with much more creativity while honoring the photographer’s shot selection — such as Flickr displaying panorama shots across the entire page:

I’m sold. Flickr, I’m back.

“I think Flickr is awesome again with these new announcements,” Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer said. “Photos make the world go around. Flickr was awesome once. It languished. But now it’s awesome again.”

I agree. And so does one of the more famous photographers on Flickr, Thomas Hawk:

despite all of the naysayers about the new @flickr, my page has never had more engagement than it has there in the last 3 days.

]]>1OK, new Flickr, you got me. I'm back.Marissa Mayer explains how Yahoo will keep Tumblr from meeting Flickr’s fatehttp://venturebeat.com/2013/05/20/marissa-mayer-tumblr-flickr/
http://venturebeat.com/2013/05/20/marissa-mayer-tumblr-flickr/#commentsMon, 20 May 2013 22:35:37 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=741065Some Tumblr fans want to know how Yahoo plans to avoid the fate of Flickr, Geocities, and other failed acquisitions. So we asked Marissa Mayer.
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NEW YORK CITY — Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer just announced a stunning redesign of photo-sharing site Flickr, a property Yahoo let languish for years. But the announcement comes the same day as the $1.1 billion acquisition of Tumblr, another beloved property with a missing vowel and an “r” at the end of its name.

So I asked Mayer what changes she has made inside Yahoo to ensure that what happened to Flickr won’t happen to Tumblr.

Mayer said first and foremost that the hiring of new top-level management would help make sure Tumblr doesn’t become Flickr: Part Two.

“It all comes down to people,” Mayer said. “We have an all-new executive management team.”

She also said she had learned from past major acquisitions, including Google’s buy of YouTube and eBay’s purchase of PayPal. Those deals worked because the companies remained independent and kept their own culture, Mayer explained.

“When we look at superscale acquisitions like eBay, PayPal, Google, YouTube, a meme arises,” Mayer said. “Those companies have so much momentum and they often do better when operated independently. Learning from that history is why we made the commitment to operate Tumblr independently.”

Earlier in the event, Mayer said that Yahoo would be moving all 500 of its New York employees to a new office in Times Square. Notably, all Tumblr employees will stay isolated in their own offices, which shows Mayer is serious about them maintaining some independence. That independence will (hopefully) keep the company young and inspired.

“The idea is for Tumblr brand to continue with its vision — a vision that appeals to millennials,” Mayer said.

You can also look to the announcement today to revitalize Flickr as a sign that Mayer won’t let Tumblr meet a similar fate to Flickr.

“I think Flickr is awesome again with these new announcements,” Mayer said. “Photos make the world go around. Flickr was awesome once. It languished. But now it’s awesome again.”

Photo via Sean Ludwig/VentureBeat

]]>0Marissa Mayer explains how Yahoo will keep Tumblr from meeting Flickr’s fateYahoo ‘reimagines’ Flickr with a bold new design, a free TB of space for all users, & morehttp://venturebeat.com/2013/05/20/yahoo-flickr-redesign/
http://venturebeat.com/2013/05/20/yahoo-flickr-redesign/#commentsMon, 20 May 2013 21:30:14 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=740936Yahoo acquired Flickr back in 2005, but the photo-sharing service suffered under persistent mismanagement. Now it looks like Yahoo is finally giving Flickr the attention it deserved back in the day.
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Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer acknowledged that the Flickr acquisition “didn’t go so well.” But now Flickr is getting better with a bold new redesign, and the new design is live now.

“We’ve made Flickr spectacular,” Mayer said. “We’ve got full high-resolution photos. You don’t lose any fidelity. No one else does that.”

First, photos will be bigger and the design emphasizes high-resolution images. Every user will get 1TB of space for their photos at no cost. Yahoo says that’s 537,731 photos of average size that you can store for free.

“I think Flickr is awesome again with these new announcements,” Mayer said. “Photos make the world go around. Flickr was awesome once. It languished. But now it’s awesome again.”

Just for reference, this is what a standard photo page on Flickr used to look like:

Now that same page looks like this:

The announcement comes at the same time as the Tumblr acquisition. After numerous reports the past few days, Yahoo finally confirmed that it had purchased Tumblr for about $1.1 billion early this morning. Mayer promised “not to screw it up.” Tumblr CEO and founder David Karp will remain CEO of the company he started, and Tumblr will stay an independent company from Yahoo.

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg was also on hand at the event to congratulate Yahoo and Tumblr on the deal.

“We’re proud that Tumblr is a homegrown company,” Bloomberg said. “We couldn’t be more excited for them. … Not only are David and Tumblr made in New York, they’ve helped us make a better New York.”

With the event in New York, Yahoo also appropriately announced that it will soon open a new office in New York City. Yahoo has taken out a lease for office space at 229 West 43rd Street, which is the old New York Times building. All of the 500 New York Yahoo employees will be moved there. Tumblr’s employees will remain separate in their own office.

Photo via Sean Ludwig/VentureBeat

]]>1Yahoo ‘reimagines’ Flickr with a bold new design, a free TB of space for all users, & moreFlickr for iPhone now lets you download photos, mention friends, & upload pics fasterhttp://venturebeat.com/2013/02/21/flickr-iphone-updated/
http://venturebeat.com/2013/02/21/flickr-iphone-updated/#commentsThu, 21 Feb 2013 16:06:04 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=626245Flickr for iPhone has lots of new features, a sign that Marissa Mayer is serious about making Yahoo a product company again.
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Yahoo has updated its Flickr app for iPhone with several new features to improve the experience, including downloading Flickr photos to your phone, faster picture uploads, and being able to mention your friends with an “@” tag.

Flickr has struggled over the years to stay relevant, and the rise of Instagram hurt whatever chance it had of being the dominant mobile photo-sharing app. But Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer clearly likes Flickr and has made sure the app has gotten some attention. On the mobile front, Mayer said she wants to eliminate up to 80 percent of Yahoo’s mobile apps, but Flickr clearly isn’t one of them.

You can now mention your friends right from the app. Start by typing in the @ sign, and then simply select one of your Flickr contacts to mention them in a title, description or comment. We will notify your friends that you mentioned them.

Download your photos!

You can now download your own photos from Flickr to your camera roll. Just tap the share icon on any of your photos and tap “Save Photo”. A few seconds later the photo will be in your iPhone’s camera roll in the largest available resolution.

Faster than light (nearly)!

Uploads from the Flickr app are much faster. We did some magic to optimize uploads, but also start uploading in the background while you think about the photo’s title or where you want to share it to. You basically get the best of both worlds: High resolution uploads that will make sure that you can enjoy your photos in great quality in the future, plus fast uploads in the background, so that you don’t have to wait.

And there is more: Photos that you take with the Flickr camera are now immediately saved to your camera roll. We also now display an even higher resolution image in the lightbox view, so you can zoom in further and see all of the details. Lastly you can now take photos in a snap by using your iPhone’s volume up button.

]]>0Flickr for iPhone now lets you download photos, mention friends, & upload pics fasterHow to take back control of your own social networkshttp://venturebeat.com/2012/12/20/dylans-desk-social-networking/
http://venturebeat.com/2012/12/20/dylans-desk-social-networking/#commentsThu, 20 Dec 2012 16:15:02 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=592455If you don't like the way social networks try to own your data, but you're not willing to sign off completely, there is a third way. Here's how to regain control of your own stuff without giving up Twitter and Facebook.
]]>Gaming execs:Join 180 select leaders from King, Glu, Rovio, Unity, Facebook, and more to plan your path to global domination in 2015. GamesBeat Summit is invite-only -- apply here. Ticket prices increase on April 3rd!

Click here if you’d like my weekly column sent directly to your inbox. It takes less than a minute to sign up, and you’ll get the stories before they’re published on VentureBeat.

So, fine: These companies are entitled to run themselves the way they want, and you can participate or not, as you choose.

But I want to suggest a third way, which leaves you in control of your own stuff.

It’s called blogging.

That’s a bit of a retro suggestion, because blogs have taken a back seat to other forms of expression in the past few years. The RSS feed never engendered the kind of reciprocal sharing and commenting that a well-designed social network does, and as a result, many people have migrated away from blogging.

“I’ve used many social networks. Friendster, Facebook, everything. But they come and go. But my blog has always been my home on the web,” Matt Mullenweg, the founder of WordPress, told me last week. “What’s changed in the past few years is that blogging started to feel a bit more lonely, because it wasn’t connected to these social news feeds.”

Like Mullenweg, those of us who have had blogs for a decade or more have been using them less and less, drawn to the ease of tweeting and the warm, friendly responsiveness of Facebook.

But now it’s possible to circle back to the blog without giving up the social networks. In fact, it’s increasingly easy to use a blog as the center of your social universe.

That’s because, while social networks like Facebook and Twitter are reluctant to share data out, they are eager to bring your data in. (This is why Twitter no longer lets you update your LinkedIn status from Twitter, but you can do the reverse and update your Twitter status from LinkedIn.)

So if they won’t share, fine: Make your own website the source, and share it out to various other networks as a way of staying in touch with your friends there.

If you’re a WordPress user, a feature called Publicize makes this super-simple. (It’s built in to WordPress.com, and for people who host their own blogs using the open-source WordPress.org code, Publicize is now available through the Jetpack plugin.) With Publicize, you connect your blog to the social services you want to update: Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Tumblr. You may also connect it to Yahoo’s profile updates, but I don’t know anyone who uses those. It doesn’t have Google+ integration, a minor downside if you are one of the few who uses Google+. Once connected, every post you publish on your blog posts to the social networks you chose.

This, I’ve found, creates a subtle shift in the way I think about blogging. Blog posts are more integrated into my social networks — plural — and in turn, my social networks are tied into the posts I write.

Sure, I’ll still get @ replies on Twitter and comments on Facebook, and I’ll still post short updates that are unique to those networks. But with this setup, I’m less dependent on any one social network.

If I get tired of one network — say, Instagram pisses me off with a terms of service update — it’s far easier for me to relocate somewhere else, like Yahoo’s long-disused Flickr service, which just added a new iOS app that has its own Instagram-like photo filters. (It’s easy to post photos from Flickr onto a WordPress blog, and from there to your social networks, but going the other direction — from blog to Flickr — is trickier, probably because Flickr isn’t tied in to those Yahoo updates I mentioned above.)

Flickr, by the way, has been sending me a flood of notifications about new people following me, something I haven’t seen in several years on the service. I’m not the only one to notice this. Apparently, its new app has caught people’s eyes.

Bringing blogs and social networks together is exactly what the makers of WordPress were thinking with the Publicize add-on.

“We found that when we hooked them up, you can have the best of both worlds,” Mullenweg told me. “We’ve been trying to just close that loop.”

WordPress has more clout than you might think: According to at least one estimate, it powers 17.5 percent of the world’s websites. (That includes VentureBeat, which runs on WordPress.com, as well as my personal blogs.) And it’s an open-source system, not controlled by any one company, and not beholden to advertisers or data miners or other interests.

If the WordPress plan works, more people may return to blogging, not just as a form of self-expression but as a way of organizing their online social lives. As that happens, it might — just maybe — encourage a slightly longer attention span than you can manage with 140 characters.

“WordPress users are some of the most savvy users on the web,” Mullenweg told me. “They have accounts everywhere. They already have a Facebook and a Tumblr and so forth. So it’s a challenge to provide something different, something that’s geared more toward longer-form content, rather than something that’s a distraction, that you check while you’re busy.”

Imagine that. Along with owning our own words, we might actually start to think a little more deeply about them, too.

]]>0How to take back control of your own social networksUnlike Instagram, Flickr latches on to Twitterhttp://venturebeat.com/2012/12/12/flickr-twitter-cards/
http://venturebeat.com/2012/12/12/flickr-twitter-cards/#commentsWed, 12 Dec 2012 19:22:04 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=588812The Yahoo-owned Flickr, alongside the release of a brand new app for iPhone, threw in support for Twitter Cards this morning, bringing its newly filtered captures to tweets near you.
]]>Gaming execs:Join 180 select leaders from King, Glu, Rovio, Unity, Facebook, and more to plan your path to global domination in 2015. GamesBeat Summit is invite-only -- apply here. Ticket prices increase on April 3rd!

Twitter’s expanded tweets party is minus one VIP guest, but several other social services seem eager to make an appearance. The Yahoo-owned Flickr, alongside the release of a new app for iPhone, threw in support for Twitter Cards this morning, bringing its newly filtered captures to tweets near you.

Flickr vice president Brett Wayn hinted about the integration in a blog post this morning. Head of product Markus Spiering confirmed to VentureBeat that the Twitter Cards update went live early this morning.

Above: A Flickr photo as seen on Twitter

Now, when you share a photo from Flickr to Twitter (from the new iPhone app or anywhere else), that photo shows up right inside your tweet, meaning your followers can enjoy the capture without leaving Twitter. Flickr previously employed a custom integration that enabled Twitter desktop users to see photos in-line with tweets, Spiering said, but the Yahoo photo property reworked the functionality to make its photos viewable inside Twitter’s mobile apps as well.

“When you think about what a user really wants, if you use the Flickr app, you chose Flickr as your photo service, and you upload your photos to Flickr,” Spiering said. “But also you make the explicit choice to share somewhere else. As a user, your expectation probably is … that you want to have your photos look as best as possible on the destination that you share them to.”

In-tweet Flickr photos are powered by Twitter Cards, also known as expanded tweets. Third-party partners can work with the information network to put their content inside your tweets for instant gratification. A smattering of companies, most recently Pinterest, have worked with Twitter to get their content in front of more people. But not Instagram. The hot photo-sharing app collected its square, stylized shots and went home.

With both Twitter and Flickr now offering their members photo filters, some could now see the companies as competitors. Flickr, however, desperately needs support from the hipper, more popular Twitter if the veteran photo-sharing service is to make a comeback. It also appreciates its relationship with Twitter, Spiering told me.

“For the mobile launch, it was important to us that we fully embrace Twitter’s platform and capabilities to provide the best photo-sharing experience for Flickr users,” he said.

Flickr also made adjustments to how its photos are viewed on Facebook. Now, photos shared from Flickr to Facebook are shown in full and look as if they were directly uploaded to Facebook, Spiering explained.

]]>0Unlike Instagram, Flickr latches on to TwitterYahoo jumps on Instagram bandwagon, adds filters to Flickr iPhone apphttp://venturebeat.com/2012/12/12/flickr-iphone/
http://venturebeat.com/2012/12/12/flickr-iphone/#commentsWed, 12 Dec 2012 15:55:08 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=588593Just a day after releasing new email apps for iOS and other platforms, Yahoo has updated its Flickr app for iPhone with Instagram-like filters, an easier sign-up process, and more.
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The once promising Flickr photo-sharing service languished after Yahoo purchased it. First Facebook took over by giving everyone a place to share their favorite pics. Now the Facebook-owned Instagram is the king of mobile photo-sharing. So it only makes sense for Flickr to copy some of Facebook and Instagram’s ideas to get more people to use Flickr again or try it for the first time. Twitter just added its own photo filters after Twitter and Instagram removed Instagram photo previews from inside Twitter.

Yahoo is amid changes under the direction of former Google VP Marissa Mayer, who took over as its CEO earlier this year. Mayer has pushed for an emphasis on products, and her gameplan for Yahoo’s comeback includes pushing for mobile, partnerships, and acqui-hires. New email and Flickr apps seems like a great start to fleshing out Yahoo’s mobile position.

]]>0Yahoo jumps on Instagram bandwagon, adds filters to Flickr iPhone appThe average American spends $857 on monthly subscriptions (infographic)http://venturebeat.com/2012/12/11/the-average-american-spends-857-on-monthly-subscriptions-infographic/
http://venturebeat.com/2012/12/11/the-average-american-spends-857-on-monthly-subscriptions-infographic/#commentsTue, 11 Dec 2012 23:22:42 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=588260Subscription revenue is the new old thing, apparently. Flickr — remember Flickr? — charges $6.95 a month to share your photos to the world, if you want pro functionality. Buffer, the social media sharing and analytics company, charges $10/month for anything beyond the freemium crumbs. And Dropbox goes from $10-50/month, just at the consumer level. […]
]]>Subscription revenue is the new old thing, apparently.

Flickr — remember Flickr? — charges $6.95 a month to share your photos to the world, if you want pro functionality. Buffer, the social media sharing and analytics company, charges $10/month for anything beyond the freemium crumbs. And Dropbox goes from $10-50/month, just at the consumer level.

But subscription revenue has been around a lot longer than even the oldest dot-com. Aria Systems, a software-as-a-service billings platform, put together an infographic with all the subscriptions that the average American — you know, the person who lives next door and just got an Android phone — pays every month.

It’s a massive $857/month … mostly because of items that we don’t typically think of as subscription payments, but actually are. Things like insurance, a mobile phone plan, and utilities. Even the biggest one of all: health care.

Over time, startups can only hope that some of this revenue, most of which is dumped into the laps of massive contenders in yesterday’s economy, will come their way.

HootSuite, the service that 79 of the world’s Fortune 100 companies use to manage their social media presence, just added apps for Instagram, SlideShare, Edocr, and Zuum in its App Directory.

The company provides a unified interface where social media managers can monitor and manage their activity across multiple social networks, including Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Additional social networks can be added via apps in the HootSuite App Directory, enabling users to manage YouTube, Flickr, and others.

Instagram is a big integration for HootSuite, as the service continues to grow in popularity, currently adding five million users a week. And SlideShare is a major platform for sharing presentations and PowerPoint decks.

Plus, since HootSuite already helps its clients manage their LinkedIn presence, and LinkedIn purchased SlideShare for $119 million earlier this year, it was a natural next step.

In a statement, chief executive Ryan Holmes said the company picked these networks to add to the App Directory because they enable the sharing of rich media content that aids engagement:

“We’re excited to welcome these popular social networks because they’re centrally focused around the easy sharing of multimedia content.”

The Instagram app will allow users to view and search photos, read what others have written, add comments, like photos, and share them to other social networks. Similarly, the SlideShare app helps users upload, find, and share content

The App Directory is one of the ways HootSuite distinguishes itself from competitors such as SproutSocial and Involver. Perhaps the only competitor with something similar is Radian6, with its Extension Gallery. Mark Holder, HootSuite’s director of integration partners, told VentureBeat that “roughly 10-15% of new users install at least one app within the first week.”

Created in December of last year, the App Directory features apps for integrating email marketing, surveys, RSS feeds, and more into users’ social media management activities. There’s even an app to manage Orkut, the Google-owned Brazilian social network.

The additions of Zuum and Edocr are a bit surprising.

Zuum is somewhat interesting, as it is a platform for social media marketing strategy, which is somewhat competitive to HootSuite, but it also provides insight into guaranteed-to-be-engaging content, helping social media managers know what kinds of content they should post.

Edocr, on the other hand, is a tiny business-document sharing site focused on lead generation, with only some thousands of monthly visitors. I’ve asked HootSuite why it chose Edocr and Zuum, and I’ll update this post when the company replies.

[ Update: the response was inconclusive. According to Holder, “Instagram and SlideShare have been among the top requested apps from our Free, Pro and Enterprise clients.” ]

I did ask the company when full Google+ integration is coming to HootSuite, but there is no specific timetable yet. Holder had the following to say via email:

We are not able to provide a specific date at this time as to when Google+ will be available to all HootSuite users. HootSuite was selected as an official partner by Google+ Pages, and we are currently working with their team to gather data from our current Enterprise clients actively using the integration.”

HootSuite is based in Vancouver, Canada, and has almost 200 employees. In March of this year, the company raised $20 million from OMERS Ventures.

]]>0HootSuite: 4 million users can now manage Instagram & SlideShare tooNot dead yet, Flickr adds life to its 1.5M groupshttp://venturebeat.com/2012/05/24/flickr-groups/
http://venturebeat.com/2012/05/24/flickr-groups/#commentsThu, 24 May 2012 18:00:42 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=460538Gaming execs: Join 180 select leaders from King, Glu, Rovio, Unity, Facebook, and more to plan your path to global domination in 2015. GamesBeat Summit is invite-only -- apply here. Ticket prices increase on April 3rd! Trying to prove that its not dead yet, Yahoo owned-Flickr is releasing yet another batch of updates, but this time with the emphasis on improving […]
]]>Gaming execs:Join 180 select leaders from King, Glu, Rovio, Unity, Facebook, and more to plan your path to global domination in 2015. GamesBeat Summit is invite-only -- apply here. Ticket prices increase on April 3rd!

Trying to prove that its not dead yet, Yahoo owned-Flickr is releasing yet another batch of updates, but this time with the emphasis on improving its Groups.

Thursday, Groups on Flickr, the site’s community-shared photo pools, have been gifted with the acclaimed “Justified View” (pictured above) for a richer, more impactful photo-browsing experience. The Groups experience also now features a right-hand sidebar for additional photo context, and allows for direct photo uploads. Flickr has even released new Group APIs for third-party app developers.

Just how popular are Flickr Groups? There are more than 1.5 million groups on Flickr with a total of 1.2 billion photos spread across them, and 850,000 photos are added to groups each day, a Flickr spokesperson said.

The most arresting update to Groups is the introduction of the Justified layout, which features group photos in an image-centric, collage-like grid. The view reveals high-resolution images on scroll-over and includes a light-box option for a full-screen view of a selected image. Flickr members were first introduced to the Justified view three months ago when Flickr rolled out a revamped Contacts page.

The new Group sidebar is an interesting addition to the Groups experience and should stimulate conversation for the photo-sharers still active in their Groups. The sidebar, a part of the Justified view, surfaces the most recent discussions happening in a group, and highlights the top group contributors and tags.

Flickr members may also appreciate that they can now finally upload photos simultaneously and directly to their groups when using the new Flickr Uploadr tool. Why Flickr is just now introducing a direct-to-Group photo upload feature, however, boggles the mind.

The past three months have been jammed packed with Flickr feature updates, with development and vision spearheaded by head of product Markus Spiering who continues to promise significant changes to the product and user experience.

So far, Flickr’s feature-by-feature facelift has been as rejuvenating as an eyebrow lift or a chemical peel. Sure, there are some noticeable cosmetic improvements here and there, but the procedures, just as in real life, aren’t fooling anyone. A little nip and tick doesn’t appear to be the solution to bringing the photo sharing community back to the heyday of its youth.

]]>0Not dead yet, Flickr adds life to its 1.5M groupsGoogle+ wants to be your new Flickrhttp://venturebeat.com/2012/05/22/google-wants-to-be-your-new-flickr/
http://venturebeat.com/2012/05/22/google-wants-to-be-your-new-flickr/#commentsTue, 22 May 2012 21:31:43 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=459078Gaming execs: Join 180 select leaders from King, Glu, Rovio, Unity, Facebook, and more to plan your path to global domination in 2015. GamesBeat Summit is invite-only -- apply here. Ticket prices increase on April 3rd! Google+ is succeeding in small bursts, feature by feature. As a social network competing with Facebook it’s a flop, but its video-chat tool Hangouts is […]
]]>Gaming execs:Join 180 select leaders from King, Glu, Rovio, Unity, Facebook, and more to plan your path to global domination in 2015. GamesBeat Summit is invite-only -- apply here. Ticket prices increase on April 3rd!

Google+ is succeeding in small bursts, feature by feature. As a social network competing with Facebook it’s a flop, but its video-chat tool Hangouts is a winner. Now photo sharing is poised to be the service’s next breakout hit, thanks to an enthusiastic community of photographers who like the focus on attractive full-size images, Google+’s new photo-centric iPhone app, and a uniquely Google passion for metadata.

In fact, Google+ is pushing hard on the photography front and is in a great position to dominate the floundering Flickr.

The Google+ team teamed up with Kelby Training for a two-day Google+ Photographers Conference in San Francisco, or as it was adorably called, a HIRL — Hangout in Real Life. Vice president of product for Google+ Bradley Horowitz (pictured above), who led Yahoo’s purchase of Flickr in 2005, kicked off the event Tuesday by talking about the future of photography, how Flickr changed his outlook, and whether ads will ever make an appearance in Google+.

A camera that records your blood pressure

“I feel photos are the lifeblood of our service,” said Horowitz. “They are the way we can most immediately and viscerally connect as human beings.”

For the past four-plus years, Horowitz has pushed his passion for “social computing” at Google: combining photos, algorithms, and human interaction. While some of us may see the rising flood of images and data — from camera settings to GPS location — as overwhelming, Horowitz sees it as an opportunity. He thinks the future lies in capturing even more data, sharing more information, having more sensors, and recording more dimensions.

For example, we generate so much information that going through it to find gems is becoming more and more difficult. Ironically, even more data can be used to bring order to overload.

“I want to know everything I can about the environment,” said Horowitz. “I would like to know more detailed information about the roll, pitch, yaw of the camera. About the lens optics, about even the blood pressure of person whose hand is on the camera, even the galvanic skin response.” These biological markers can be used to identify the special and meaningful moments in your life worth remembering, such as the happiness you felt seeing your kid take her first steps.

Tools like Google’s own Google Glass could be a great start for capturing all of this information, but of course there are a few kinks to be worked out first.

“I never know whether Vic is listening to me or not,” said Horowitz of Google’s Vic Gundotra, who sometimes sports the augmented reality glasses during meetings.

We are capable of so much more than Instagram

Capturing pixels is just the beginning of a photo. How it’s processed and used after it’s on a computer is becoming even more important. Google has multiple properties that dabble in photos, including Picasa, Google+, Drive, and even email. The next step is to combine those tools together, something Horowitz admits is still an issue.

“Ultimately the brand distinction between those needs to go away… we’re working hard to erase the seams between these experiences,” said Horowitz in response to a question about the difference between Picasa and Google+. “The fact that you have to ask it is a failing on our part.”

Eventually Google aims to blur the line between the device and the cloud, so all the data you generate is automatically backed up, archived, and secured in a nice non-obtrusive manner. Automating this synthesizing stage would free up time for photographers to focus on the more enjoyable process of manipulating the data.

Horowitz wants to increase the power its own post-processing tools, making image editors scalable so that an amateur can use them as easily as a professional photographer. Replacing the very segmented image editing market and creating a tool that is equal parts Instagram, Lightroom, and Photoshop is an especially ambitious (perhaps naive) idea.

Google wants you to think of ads as little presents

The absence of ads in Google+’s lightbox, the tool that shows your images, is part of what appeals to the many photographers who use the service. But certainly it’s only a beta perk, right? After all, a whopping 96 percent of Google’s revenue comes from advertising. Google’s philosophy when it comes to ads is that they can be a very useful part of the user experience (as they are in search results). However, it doesn’t want to serve them where or when they don’t belong and won’t be the most effective.

“We don’t think of ads as punishments the users must endure, we think of ads done well as something that users would cry over if we took them away,” Horowitz said.

The company has not yet found a way to make ads useful in the lightbox. If a Google+ user is looking at photos of their family, says Horowitz, “the last thing you want to do is stick an ad between that intimate moment and intimate interaction.” Instead, Google leans more towards collecting data and delivering it when the context and time are right.

For example, say you review a restaurant. Google will tuck that information away and deliver it when it is relevant, perhaps six months later when one of your friends looks for a restaurant recommendation in the same area. “That’s a gift from me to that person facilitated by Google.”

And it all started with Flickr

Horowitz has a background in photography, like many others on the Google+ team (“We are geeks, and photographer geeks are a sub-flavor of geeks.”) As a grad student, Horowitz worked on some of the earliest image-processing programs and algorithms that analyzed images.

Eventually he landed at Yahoo as the head of multimedia search, which is where he met the founders of Flickr, a “fascinating, tiny little company in Canada.” They asked why, instead of writing complex algorithms to analyze images, he didn’t just ask people to volunteer their knowledge, à la Flickr’s tagging? People can just look at an image and say if it’s a dog, a person, or even if its funny or snarky.

“I realized my algorithms were so far from having a snarky detector that this was a better approach,” said Horowitz. “A little bit of social engineering was better than all the algorithmic approach… it introduced the concept of bringing people and community into the equation.”

Horowitz went on to oversee Yahoo’s acquisition of Flickr, and eventually moved on from the company. But now, many years later, the idea of social computing that Flickr planted in his head is being used to turn Google+ into real Flickr competitor.

Yahoo’s Flickr photo-sharing community has been in makeover mode of late and is getting incrementally better with subtle upgrades. Tuesday, Flickr released a reworked photo page layout with a new look that’s nearly impossible to miss — especially on large displays.

Flickr’s “liquid” layout, as it’s called, is a dynamic format for each photo page that now features newly supported hi-res images on the main photo page. The layout also automatically adjusts the photo page and image size based on the user’s browser window size to feature the biggest photo size appropriate for each photo viewer.

“Flickr is known for its outstanding image quality that enables people to showcase the amazing details of their photographs,” Flickr’s head of product Markus Spiering told VentureBeat. “With our new, larger hi-resolution images and liquid design each photo page on Flickr comes alive.”

The new liquid layout is powered by an algorithm that accounts for browser width and height size, and displays content at a width that will best showcase the most common 4:3 photo ratio while also ensuring the photo title and sidebar are visible on the page, engineer Ross Harmes explained in a blog post on the technology behind the update. The algorithm also favors native photo sizes, never upscales images, and should allow for faster page load times.

The layout ultimately makes for an enriched new way to browse photos on Flickr, especially on large displays, and represents Yahoo’s renewed commitment to the photo property it let languish for far too long (we’ll have to wait and see how Flickr fits into interim CEO Ross Levinsohn’s plan for beleaguered Yahoo). But it might be too little, too late to win back or attract photo-sharers who’ve migrated to Facebook and mobile apps such as Instagram. For consideration: Flickr members upload 3.5 million photos per day; Facebook members upload 300 million photos per day.

The liquid layout featuring hi-res images has been pushed live for all Flickr users. The new photo sizes have also been added to Flickr’s API and now appear in the “All Sizes” menu.